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I'm interested in learning more about the central nervous system (CNS) arousal and the choice of what people do and how they feel about it.

Lets define CNS arousal in the context of this question as the measure of gross motor activity measured by an actigraph in a given hour. A person with high arousal would display more intense and more frequent pattern of activity (any motion), while a person with less CNS arousal would exhibit smaller and less frequent motions.

Is there any correlation between the gross sum of body movement and choice of activity? Are people experiencing high CNS arousal more likely to engage in activities?

A related question is - if they are related, how are choice of activity and arousal give rise to each other? Does arousal cause choice of activity or does choice of activity influence CNS arousal?

You're using terms that require specific definition in a very broad manner. What do you mean by "CNS arousal"? How do you define "what people do"? "Do" in what context?
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eykanalJul 27 '12 at 16:19

You defined "CNS activity" as "gross motor activity measured by an actigraph". Doesn't this trivially correlate to people choice of activity? If I am choosing to jog, my actigraph will read higher. Are you normalizing in some way? Or are you trying to predict the future hour given on the past hour? What kind of non-trivial answer are you expecting? What is the point of the diagram? Also, I think your definition of 'CNS arousal' is non-standard and controversial. If I was you I would replace all occurrences of it and replace them by your actual actigraph-based definition.
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Artem Kaznatcheev♦Aug 9 '12 at 3:35

I think you cannot draw any conclusions between things like "high CNS arousal" and how much one "engages in activities". The real problem, I think is the vagueness of "choice of activity". That can encompass all kinds of things. Also, measuring overall CNS arousal is bound to lead to degeneracy; that is, several different activities that are organized very differently in the spatiotemporal dynamics of the brain are going to have the same total measured "activity"; it's the functional organization of the activity that is important, not the total amount.
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Keegan KeplingerSep 1 '12 at 7:21

2

This question is not very clear, and OP hasn't addressed comments. Without further edits, I am voting to close. Also, the image appears unrelated to the question, so I have removed it.
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JeffMar 30 '13 at 0:45